Collaboration

This week I attended a Professional Development (PD) workshop on co-teaching. Contrary to popular belief, teachers who don’t work in the summer sometimes spend their time trying to improve their practice for the upcoming year. So with this in mind, I attended this workshop.

Now…I will have to say I was disappointed. While the presenters did a good job of explaining and modeling station teaching, differentiated instruction and groupings, what was left out was the more nebulous part of co-teaching. In an Integrated Co-teaching (ICT) classroom, you can do all of these things and your lessons can still fall flat on their face. Why? Because co-teaching relies on more than these strategies. It relies on common planning time. And, perhaps the biggest factor, the relationship between co-teachers. Too often I’ve been in situations where my co-teacher and I were playing good cop-bad cop, or where I was to hand out materials and keep track of the bathroom pass but actually deliver instruction. So while the strategies that the PD promoted were important, it’s just as important or maybe more so that the teaching team sits down and goes over their teaching philosophies and their expectations of each other in the classroom. Both teachers in question have to be willing to do this, and not everyone is and both teachers have to really listen and adapt to each other.

The things that hold these types of conversations back are lack of time, and lack of consideration but administration about who is paired together. There is definitely lack of common planning time at my school, but we also don’t get our schedule until we come in after Labor Day and that’s when we find out for sure what classes we’re teaching and who with. That is not enough time for anyone involved to align their expectations and begin a productive co-teaching partnership. The administration at my school is attempting to be more thoughtful about who they pair together, but it always seems like someone works with someone they don’t get along with or where the other teacher isn’t interested in co-teaching. These issues are detrimental to the classroom and to student progress. Yet, a lot of times, we’re just told to make the best of things.

So what is the answer? It’s hard to say. Is it annualized scheduling so everyone knows that they’re in the co-teaching role with the same person for the whole year? Is it letting people pick who they want to work with? Is it allocating more time and consideration to who teach these ICT classes? None of these issues were really addressed in the PD. It’s really these issues that are what makes co-teaching hard, not lack of understanding on the teachers’ part of how it’s actually done and what model to use.